Cross Section Photos of Golf Balls Reveal the Diverse Beauty Within

PetaPixel

Photographer James Friedman doesn’t play golf, but he had a collection of golf balls lying around. One day, he began to wonder what the guts of the golf balls look like, so he cut a ball open to take a peek at a core. Then he sliced open another, and another; after cutting open over twenty different types of golf balls, Friedman found a strange sort of beauty that he began to document through photographs. The resulting project is titled “Interior Design“.
The photographs reveal a tiny world of strange shapes, layers, and colors. The Ohio-based photographer says that he was surprised to find “elegant formal qualities, unpredictable color schemes and metaphor” in the “unlikeliest of places.”

Some of the balls have guts that look like something you’d see when peering into a microscope in a laboratory. Others look like illustrations showing cross sections of planets. Others look like abstract circles of color and texture.

Here’s the collection of golf ball photographs Friedman created:

This project led Friedman to become more interested in the subject of abstraction. He ordinarily works as a documentary photographer, he says that these abstract photos of tiny-scale objects are an “exciting corollary” to his other work.